Jesse Garcia and a Powerful New Short Called "Sold"

He co-produces and stars in an award-winning thriller about human trafficking

Jesse Garcia has made an impression in the last few years, mostly in independent movies like "Quince??eara," an award-winner in 2006 at Sundance and Berlin, as well as "Under the Same Moon," "The Comebacks," and many others. He's done plenty of TV episodics and shorts, too, and his versatility and intensity has served him well, in arcs on "Sons of Anarchy" and "Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles" and elsewhere. And he's just finished up a part in "Re-Kill," a zombie apocalypse thriller with Daniella Alonso ("Friday Night Lights").

Now Jesse and a group of other impressive young Latinos have created a powerful short film, a thriller about human trafficking called "Sold" that he's just made available on Vimeo. We're paraphrasing what he wrote there about the film and its purposeÔÇôin part as a demo for a feature-length project that they're trying to fund.

"We screened the short at more than a dozen film festivals in 2011," he said on Vimeo, "most recently at the Austin Film Festival." It won Best Drama at the 2011 Malibu and Hollyshorts Film Festivals, too. A spot edited from the film won the highly competitive MTV contest to raise awareness for human trafficking on television and with MTV's global concert campaign.

Jesse co-produced and stars in the film, written and directed by John Irwin.

"Human trafficking is not usually a hot topic of conversation or a commonly discussed social issue," Jesse says in his Vimeo piece. "Yet it's the third most profitable crime in the world (just behind drugs and gun sales), providing around $30 billion in revenue, worldwide. This is not just a foreign epidemic-in the U.S. alone; there are an estimated 100,000 children in the sex trade. We hope that the demo for Sold can help raise awareness for human trafficking and get people excited about the feature film that is currently in development."